Water Quotas Succeed in 1st County Trial : Drought: Ten months after the city ordered them to reduce use by 15%, nearly all Ventura businesses have done so. But the cost has been steep for many.

It was Ventura County’s first taste of water rationing. And the businesses on Main Street hated it. So did the dealers on Auto Row and the store owners along Victoria Avenue.

That was last April, when Ventura’s 2,200 businesses were ordered by the City Council to cut water use by 15% or face stiff fines. Some owners were so upset that they threatened to leave town. A couple did leave.

Now, after 10 months, this first attempt at water conservation remains unpopular. But it is an apparent success--and an example of how much water can be saved when businesses really try, the Greater Ventura Chamber of Commerce says.

“I think people are saying we’re going to bite the bullet and accept the reduction as a matter of necessity,” said Gene Daffern, chamber president.

In fact, Daffern and other business executives say they are proud of quickly adapting to the drought. They feel good about conserving water that they previously had wasted without much thought.

Daffern said the small firm he manages, Capp’s Electronics Inc., has cut water use by 83% since last spring. It has shut off its landscape sprinklers, installed low-flow faucets and toilets, switched to a more efficient water softener and left its service trucks embarrassingly dirty, he said.

The lessons of Ventura’s first difficult months of water quotas are noteworthy because nearby cities now have reason to learn from them. In recent weeks, four have passed rationing laws requiring cuts of 10%.

And last week, in response to the worsening drought, the regional agency that supplies two-thirds of the water for residents and businesses in Ventura County announced a cutback of 20% effective March 1. Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Moorpark, Camarillo and Oxnard will all be affected.

“At this point we still don’t know what the requirements are going to be on businesses. It changes so often,” said Stephen Rubenstein, president of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of some water-dependent businesses, owners are wondering if they will have to shut their doors one day a week and watch profits plummet to meet new requirements.

“In a laundry situation it’s kind of impossible,” said Janet Carlsen, whose family owns a coin-operated laundry in Oxnard. “We can’t control how many people come in. We’ve even started straining our cleanup water through cheesecloth to save half a gallon a day.”

But if Ventura’s experience is duplicated elsewhere, such stringent measures will not be necessary--at least if cuts remain at 20%.

Though quotas were not imposed until April, Ventura used 20% less water in 1990 and reductions approached 30% for the last two months of the year, officials said.

After a lengthy and difficult period of adjustment, Ventura water officials now claim 90% compliance with quotas that call for 15% cuts by business, 20% reductions by government agencies and place a frugal 294-gallon-a-day limit on use in most households.

Nearly all of the city’s top water users--oil companies, hospitals, mobile home parks, a large hotel and city and county agencies--are within their quotas. But the cost of compliance has been steep in some cases.

For example, Ventura County is spending $80,000 to fix the Medical Center’s laundry so that it can recycle water. And the Holiday Inn has spent $15,000 to retrofit fixtures in its 240 rooms, kitchens and laundry.

“You pay now, or you pay later,” said Bill Spresser, the 12-story hotel’s general manager. “When I look at the size of these fines from the city, it gives me chills. I guess this shows that fear is still a good motivator.”

Texaco Producing Inc.--which shares with Shell Oil Co. the distinction of being the largest water users in Ventura--is spending more than $120,000 a year to meet its quota. It has replaced the fresh water that it once pumped into the ground to force oil to the surface with brackish water from its own well.

It would have been cheaper to pay the fines, but the critical nature of the drought made that unacceptable, said Texaco spokesman David Cohen, an engineer at the firm’s Ventura oil field.

“People have a tendency to want to crucify us,” he said, “but we’re just citizens here too.”

Texaco has cut back about 20% and Shell nearly 33%, the companies said. Shell’s reduction has come almost exclusively through cuts in the amount of fresh water pumped to force oil out of its 350 local wells, a spokesman said.

On a smaller scale, in another business that depends on water for its survival, the Laundry House bought 40 new coin-operated washing machines last year. Owner Jack Hart said the machines reduced water per load from as much as 60 gallons to about 33 gallons.

Similarly, Robert Formanek, owner of Five-Points Car Wash, said he was able to meet his quota by recycling rinse water and dumping tubs for towel cleaning five times a day instead of 10. The result has been a 19% cut, from more than 17 gallons per car to about 14, he said.

But the switch to careful water consumption by companies ranging from supermarkets to department stores and office buildings has not been accomplished without some acrimony.

About 10% of Ventura’s water customers have been fined more than $1 million for overuse, including recent levies of 10 times the usual rate against 135 businesses and 231 owners of houses or apartments, all of which had exceeded their allocations for six straight months.

“It’s a nightmare. They’ve built a monster. And they can’t manage it themselves,” said Fred Short, owner of a small medical office building and a 750-tree avocado orchard next to his house in Hidden Valley. Both businesses depend on city water, and both have now been classified as chronic water wasters.

“I realize we have a water shortage, and it scares me,” Short said. “But the city has been too quick to penalize people and not take special circumstances into account.”

Short’s allocation--like those of other businesses--represents 85% of his water use over the three years before rationing was imposed. But Short said he has been frustrated when appealing to the city. He insists that he underwatered his trees for years, then was forced to give them more water this winter because it was unusually hot and dry.

The result is that he has been fined for overuse. “I can’t continue to farm if I have to pay $6,000 water bills,” Short said.

The city says it continues to review Short’s appeal. And some officials have said they are considering new rules to deal with the rare cases where city water is used for agricultural purposes.

The city has granted higher allocations to about half of the 4,500 to 5,000 customers who have appealed, officials said. There are 26,000 customers in all, including about 2,200 businesses.

The types of businesses that appear to have had the hardest time adapting to water limits are office buildings and industrial parks, many of which lack water meters for individual tenants. That reduces accountability for water waste, city officials say. And the story is much the same for residential waste, where apartment complexes with a single meter seem to be fined with frequency.

In fact, a central lesson learned in Ventura has been the importance of meters to conservation, Mayor Richard Francis said. He will support shifting some of the money collected through fines into a program to help customers, especially those with low incomes, install water meters at their dwellings, Francis said.

Two businesses--a large business park on Valentine Road and a small motel near the Buenaventura Mall--illustrate problems with facilities without meters.

At the Mission Bell Motel, where nearly all the tenants are long-term residents, water use exceeded allocation by 51% for November and December, reaching levels even higher than last summer. “About half really try to conserve,” Manager David Doyal said.

A month ago, Doyal said, he inspected all 24 bathrooms and found that half of the low-flow shower heads that he had installed had been replaced by high-flow heads for water massage. “I put the low-flows back in, and I really cinched them down this time,” he said.

At the 100,000-square-foot business park on Valentine Road, Trammell Crow Co. had one of the highest fines in the city over the last six months--$10,000 for using more than its allotment for a full year in just six months.

Manager Nina Glaubach said none of the complex’s 20 suites is separately metered. But she said that probably her biggest problem was a “water-happy” maintenance man who sprinkled plants daily. Landscaping is now watered twice a week.

Despite widespread publicity about Ventura’s water sanctions last spring, some business customers say steep water bills have sneaked up on them. And they say their penalties have been not just fines but tarnished public images.

Perhaps no company in Ventura promotes itself as a community-oriented business more than Vons, whose supermarkets offer rebates to children’s clubs and allow schools to exchange market receipts for personal computers.

But last week Bill Lange, manager of the Vons on Thompson Boulevard, said he was welcomed to work by employees who told him that his store had been identified in newspaper stories as a chronic water waster.

“You know, we don’t need that kind of publicity,” he said. “But this was all brand new to me.”

Lange’s store has been fined $8,373 for overuse of water since last July, but he said he didn’t know about it because the bills were mailed to the corporate headquarters in Arcadia.

The store only uses water to mist vegetables, clean floors and wash dishes from its deli, he said. He was at a loss to explain why water use was nearly double the store’s allotment.

Likewise, it was not until January when a $630 fine came in the mail that Crown Dodge executives became aware that the dealership was overusing water, said Sales Manager Sean Brockett.

Since then, water use has tightened. About 350 new cars have not been washed for three weeks and a large sign notifies service customers that the water shortage means that their cars will no longer be washed when they get a tuneup, Brockett said.

In some cases, companies have cut back water use sharply but still have not met city quotas. They say their allotments are based on three-year use and fast-growing firms have been saddled at least temporarily with quotas that are too low.

For example, managers at the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Co. plant on Ventura Avenue say they have cut water use by 17% from a year ago but still are over their allotment because they are shipping 15% to 30% more soft drinks than three years ago.

An appeal is pending, said Plant Manager Bruce McDowell. Ventura’s rationing law allows for changes based on growth.

Whether he prevails or not, McDowell said, he sees rationing as a good thing since water that once was flushed down the drain without a second thought is now reused.

But he is concerned about what will happen if more cuts are imposed as the drought continues.

“So far, the changes we’ve made are straightforward and logical,” he said. “We’ve got 80% of the return for 20% of the effort. But from now on, it’s going to be 20% return for 80% of the effort.”